


Unending Afterthoughts

by malcolmreeds



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen, Trans Male Character, trans rodney
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-30
Updated: 2014-11-30
Packaged: 2018-02-27 15:21:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2697761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malcolmreeds/pseuds/malcolmreeds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rodney had always hated the name Meredith.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unending Afterthoughts

Rodney had always hated the name Meredith.

            ‘Don’t call me that!’ he yelled at Bobby Jones in the middle of the playground one Thursday morning, ‘It’s a girl’s name!’

            ‘But it’s _your name_ ,’ Bobby Jones crooned back, pulling Rodney’s hair, ‘Meredith.’

            ‘Stop it!’

            Bobby Jones ran circles around him, chanting ‘Meredith, Meredith, Meredith!’.

A teacher rushed over when Rodney finally punched the annoying brat in the face.

            ‘What’s going on here?’ Mrs. Rundle yelled in annoyance, looking at Rodney’s bruised knuckle and Bobby Jones clutching his face.

            ‘He called me Meredith,’ Rodney said through gritted teeth.

            Mrs. Rundle clicked her tongue, ‘Don’t be such a silly girl, Meredith.’

            Rodney fidgeted with the hem of the gingham dress his mother always made him wear. He wondered how much detention he would get if he punched a teacher.

            In the end Rodney was made to sit out of the arts and crafts lesson they had next and do lines instead because he wouldn’t apologise to Bobby Jones. In his frustration he pushed down so hard on his pencil that the lead snapped under the pressure. Angrily he threw it against the wall and tore the lines he was made to write into pieces. Why should he be punished for somebody else’s mistake?

            This act however, invited a call home to his mother. Mrs. McKay turned up angrily at the school gate at the end of the day. She grabbed Rodney’s hand and marched him back inside, through the corridors and into the headmaster’s office.

            ‘But what I don’t understand,’ Mr. Macomb continued after discussing the problem with Rodney’s mother, ‘Is why your daughter felt the need to punch a boy who was referring to her by name.’

            Rodney fussed with the hem of his dress again, not looking the headmaster or his mother in the eye. They were going to think he was stupid for making such a fuss about something that they thought was so normal. But it wasn’t normal, not to him.

            It’s safe to say that Mrs. McKay was not happy with Rodney. He had to help her do all the chores around the house and she wouldn’t let him play any videogames. He was made to eat his dinner in silence and afterwards had to go straight up to bed.

 

Things only got worse in junior high and stayed worse all the way through high school. There was a dress code there, boys had to wear trousers and girls had to wear knee length skirts. Rodney hated this. He felt sick to his stomach when he had to put a skirt on every school morning. He had burst into tears when his mother had first given him the uniform, not even Jeannie could calm him down.

            ‘It’ll be alright soon Mer, after school you can wear what you want!’ Jeannie told him, in an attempt to make her older sibling smile.

            Mer was a nickname he and Jeannie had come up with together. Rodney hated being called Meredith, it was a girl’s name and he was not a girl, so he wanted to be called something else. However, his parents would throw a fit if they could Jeannie referring to Rodney as anything other than ‘Meredith’ so the nickname ‘Mer’ was born. It could stand for anything, but was close enough to his given name that his parents would be none the wiser.

            Rodney remembered his parents getting more and more irate as he could not stop crying. His mother had took him by the shoulders and shook him.

            ‘ _Be quiet Meredith_! Why can’t you just be like normal girls?!’

            These words would stay in Rodney’s memories for a long time. He had a nightmare a few weeks into his job on Atlantis and woke up in a cold sweat with these words ringing about in his ears. He couldn’t sleep afterwards, he ended up staying awake all night with Radek, reconfiguring some of the city’s main systems. Those words his mother had spoken never left him. If somebody asked him what one of the worst things was that had happened in his life, he would always be reminded of this moment.

 

He hated sport the most. The teacher would get the students to split off into separate groups of girls and boys and they would go against each other. Sport landed Rodney the most detentions. At first he’d begrudgingly trail off to the girls’ team, not wanting to get into trouble in his first few weeks at school. But he got sick of this, sick of pretending.

            One week when the teacher asked the glass to get in teams of boys and girls, Rodney hesitated. Why should he keep having to do something he didn’t want to do, damn it? So he did something which made his P.E. teacher actually gasp, he went and stood with the boys.

            ‘Meredith McKay, what on earth do you think you’re doing?’ Miss. Fairclough asked in her shrill voice.

            The other boys on the team jeered and pointed at Rodney, the girls whispered and laughed. Rodney said nothing.

            ‘Meredith McKay, get on your team this instant!’ Miss. Fairclough practically shrieked.

            ‘I’m on my team!’ Rodney hissed back, his hands bawled into fists.

            ‘Do not make me come over there girl, or it’s straight to the headmaster!’

            Still Rodney did not budge. Miss Fairclough marched over and grabbed Rodney by the wrist in an attempt to forcibly place him on the other team. Rodney was having none of it. He wriggled out of Miss Fairclough’s grip and stayed where he was. The teacher saw red.

            ‘You are to report to the headmasters’ office this instant!’ Miss. Fairclough shrieked, affronted that one of her students would dare to step out of line in her class.

            Rodney didn’t move. Miss. Fairclough got redder and redder.

            ‘This instant young lady! And do not think that we won’t inform your parents of this behaviour!’

            Rodney strode out of the gym, trying to look as uncaring as possible even though his eyes stung. He hated this school, hated the students, the teachers. He couldn’t wait until it was over, until he didn’t have to associate with these close minded people anymore.

            Rodney’s mum barely looked at him for a week.

 

Rodney didn’t have any friends at school, nobody’s parents wanted their child to associate with him. He was ‘not normal’ and a ‘disruption to other students’. This is what he heard at parents evenings anyway. He remembered the way the vein in his mother’s temple stood out long and dark and the way she pursed her lips.

            He was always highly praised in drama and science however. Rodney loved drama because it was a chance to escape, become someone other than himself. He knew that there were quite a few other social outcasts who shared his drama class, and that made him not feel quite so alone for a few hours a week. Physics, however, was his favourite subject. Everything else, all of his worries, just melted away when he concentrated on a project. His physics teacher loved him and she always let him stay for as long as he wanted after class to work on projects that weren’t even related to class work. He had nothing but praise from that class, a definite stark contrast to P.E. at least.

            One of Rodney’s most vivid school memories was when he got beat up on the way home from school. A group of boys followed him as he walked up the winding streets. They decided to make their move when the way home lead through an underpass.

            ‘Hey _Meredith_ ,’ the ringleader said tauntingly.

            The four other boys surrounded him, Rodney was trapped.

            ‘Leave me alone!’ he cried, fists clenched, ready to fight if the opportunity presented itself.

            One of the boys pulled at his hair. This was it, Rodney drew back his fist and punched him so hard on the nose that he stumbled backwards and landed on his behind. Blood bubbled from his nostrils, his nose was definitely broken. Rodney tried to run through the gap now left in the circle of boys that surrounded him, but the ringleader was too fast and grabbed his arms, pulling them behind his back.

            Rodney was beaten black and blue and left on the floor of the underpass. The boys spat at him as they walked past, saying he was a ‘freak’ and other demeaning slurs. This wasn’t the first nor the last time Rodney had been beaten up, but the way they just left him on the floor of the underpass before scarpering off stuck with him. He lay there for a little while before a woman spotted him and helped him up from the floor. She insisted on walking with him all the way home. Rodney was quite grateful for this, it was nice to have someone to chat to while he pushed down the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach as to how he was going to explain the fight to his mother.

 

When Rodney was sixteen, he cut his hair. It was short, close to his head, and it made him feel _so much better._ He knew his parents would be angry about it, his mother had forbidden him to cut his long wavy hair since he was a small child. Needless to say, his mother actually cried when she first saw and his father shouted until he was red in the face. Rodney caught Jeannie’s eye and the two of them smiled.

            This earned Rodney a slap in the face.

            ‘Why would you do this to yourself? To me?!’ his mother shouted, hysterical, ‘Do you hate me? Your father and I thought we brought you up right, what did we do wrong? What did we do to deserve _this_?’

            Rodney rubbed his sore cheek and gritted his teeth together, ‘You always wanted a son, mom.’

            ‘ _Not like this_. You are my little girl, you always will be.’

            Rodney’s throat tightened and his eyes burned, ‘I’ve never been anyone’s little girl.’

            Rodney’s mother went to slap him again but Jeannie intervened.

            ‘Stop it! Both of you!’ she screamed at her parents, stepping in front of Rodney, ‘You’re acting like animals! Stop hitting him _please_!’

            Jeannie’s eyes were spilling over with furious tears. Rodney half thought his mother would slap Jeannie with the way her hand hovered in the space between them. But his mother’s hand flopped limply to her side as she shook her head.

            ‘I’m disappointed in you Jean.’

            Jeannie said nothing, just took Rodney by the wrist and the two of them left the room.

 

Things got more bearable in college. For starters, he lived away from his close minded parents. The downside to that of course was that he couldn’t see Jeannie all the time, but they phoned each other every so often. He also learned of the wonder that was a binder, something he wished he’d known about while he was growing up. Rodney still had to sign his name as Meredith, he had not had it changed legally yet, but got his peers to call him something different and if they asked, he was definitely a guy. He went by Mark for a little while, but found the ‘M’ too reminiscent of his birth name that he so hated. Eventually he settled with the name Rodney. He couldn’t remember where he’d first heard the name or even why he liked it so much, but every time somebody referred to him as Rodney he felt more and more himself. It was like a light had been switched on somewhere in his brain. Rodney McKay, Doctor Rodney McKay. It had a nice ring to it.

            He didn’t much speak to his parents again. He felt a lot better for it. Why should he have to constantly put up with people who didn’t have their own child’s best interest at heart? Cutting ties with them was one of the best moments or Rodney’s life and he was not afraid of admitting that to anyone.

 

Rodney often found himself thinking about the culmination of events that eventually lead him to his career in Atlantis. He found it almost funny, that he had to travel all the way out _to another galaxy_ in order to find a truly safe space for himself. A place where he wasn’t judged, and where he was often surrounded by friends, people who truly and genuinely cared about him. Rodney would always find himself thankful for these people (but God, he wouldn’t dream of saying that to their faces!) and grateful that Atlantis was such an accepting place to be. John, Carson, Teyla, Ronon, Elizabeth, heck even Radek, made his adult life a whole lot better.

            If he could go back and talk to his pre-teen self, long hair and forced into dresses, if he could tell himself then how happy he would be when he got older, he wouldn’t have believed himself. And yet here he was. Never again would he have to sign anything as ‘Meredith’, he had always hated that name.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this fic because I've always thought Rodney to be a trans character [and not just because of his 'girl' first name] and I've never actually come across any fics where he was head-canoned as trans, so I felt I needed to fill that gap.  
> I am a cis woman, so I clearly have not been through any of the struggles many trans people face, and I just want to say if I've stepped out of line at any point in this fic, don't hesitate to let me know! :)


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